


not made of stone

by rainingover



Category: UNIQ (Band)
Genre: Canon Universe, Found Family, Gen, Group dynamics, Yuletide Treat, past seungyoun/yibo if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:54:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21907045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/pseuds/rainingover
Summary: Yibo doesn’t miss being looked after, until he does, and then he misses ita lot.
Comments: 25
Kudos: 115
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	not made of stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naphyla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naphyla/gifts).



> happy yuletide & thank you for giving me a wonderful reason to write uniq fic!

Yibo doesn’t miss being looked after, until he does, and then he misses it _a lot._

“We know you’re manipulating us,” Yixuan tells him pointedly as he sits on the rug in Yibo’s living room, folding laundry. Yibo’s laundry, to be precise. “We can sense it. _I_ can sense it. I knew when you messaged me that you were luring me here to do chores for you.”

“And yet, here you are…” Yibo watches him from where he sits curled up on the couch across the room,, scrolling through old videos on his phone. There’s a new round of press interviews out and he’s trying to distract himself from the comments about it on Weibo. They’ll only be full of speculation on his private life, as usual. “Doing my laundry.”

“If you’re photographed in public in dirty clothes, it’ll affect your brand.” Yixuan piles t-shirts neatly and looks up at him. “And your brand is our brand, our company’s brand. I’m doing this for _Uniq’s_ reputation.”

“Liar,” Yibo says with a grin. Uniq barely have a reputation right now, anyway. They only really exist as individuals, which is one of the reasons Yibo messaged their group chat to complain about how much laundry was piling up from the press tours. He puts down his phone and rolls off the couch and onto the floor. “Throw me that pile of socks and I’ll match them up to lighten your load.” 

Yixuan tuts but he smiles, regardless, and then pushes the laundry basket towards him on the floor. “I used to do this for all of you,” he says, proudly. “The whole group, back when we first debuted.” 

“I remember.” Yibo grins. They’re fond memories, they always will be. “I was such a baby back then.”

Yixuan just scoffs. “And you aren’t now?” he asks. He’s joking, Yibo thinks, but then, maybe he isn’t. 

Yibo just pouts back at him.

  
  
  


If he is honest, Yibo misses those days more and more lately. 

He misses being fussed over, misses the opportunity for hugs he actually wanted (and not hugs from MCs and PDs and other people who don't really care about him) and the way that his group mates would call him cute. He’d deny it at the time. He would say, “I’m _not,_ ” shake their arms off from around his shoulder and scowl. He’d say, “I’m manly,” and then he'd crack his knuckles to prove the point, but he liked it, really.

It’s different when other people say it, because they don’t _know_ him. He yearns for them to talk about his craft and not the way his face was crafted, even if he knows he can look quite handsome when he’s been all made up by professionals on the set of a magazine shoot.

He supposes that maybe he _is_ cute, but he doesn’t want to _hear_ it from people who barely know him. Hearing it from his group mates has always been different. 

He hasn’t seen Wenhan for almost a month when they bump into each other backstage at an awards show just after New Year. In truth, it’s not really a bumping into situation and more of a Yibo waiting outside of UNINE’s dressing room until Wenhan appears situation, but no one needs to know this. He's just been feeling unusually restless lately. Unusually needy.

Wenhan doesn’t exactly look surprised to see Yibo when he steps into the corridor. Instead he throws his arms around Yibo's shoulders and says, “Yibo-ah! I’m hungry.”

Yibo shrugs him off, as he always has, because that's how this goes. “We should go out for dinner,” he says.

“Now?” Wenhan looks at him strangely. His eye-makeup shimmers under the strip lights of the backstage hallway. They're both made up for the cameras and stage-lights and it's disconcerting in the bright hallway.

Yibo rolls his eyes. “ _No_ , obviously not.” They walk towards the coffee machine at the end of the corridor. “But within the next month or so, definitely. I’m on location after that for a couple of weeks.”

“To film your new drama?” Wenhan asks. They stand in front of the coffee machine, but neither of them make a move to buy anything. They’ll be in trouble with their respective stylists if they get coffee down their shirts before the show starts. 

Yibo nods. “Maybe Yixuan-gege will be able to meet up with us too,” he says. "I know you're all busy at the moment, though."

Wenhan smiles. “We’ll sort something out. That doesn’t help me with being hungry right now, though.”

“Yeah, I can’t help with that. Sorry.” Yibo shrugs. “I’ll pay, though, when we go for dinner. I’ll treat you two old men.”

Wenhan laughs. “Cute,” he says and he wraps his arm around Yibo’s shoulder again. He must be wearing big insoles tonight because he’s taller than usual. Yibo doesn’t shrug him off this time and he is in a good mood for the rest of the evening.

  
  
  
  


Dinner with Yixuan and Wenhan is a rushed affair; they can barely get an evening off at the same time, so they end up grabbing sushi in Chaoyang the night before Yibo has to travel for work. He’s tired and he has a headache, and Yixuan picks up on this right away. “You’re sick,” he says, as Yibo winces against the harsh lights above them. He loves the food in this place usually, but tonight he isn't feeling it.

“I’m just tired,” he admits, but he feels stupid for letting exhaustion get the better of him, especially when he isn’t the only person running on adrenaline and caffinated beverages in this industry. Not by a long shot. “I’m just busy, you both know how it is, right?” 

“We’ll go by an all-night pharmacy after this,” Yixuan tells him. "And pick you up some remedies." 

“I can buy my own medicine,” Yibo points out, but then he relents, remembers who he is with. Sometimes Yibo wishes he hadn’t been so adamant when he was younger that he was the cool, mature guy, rebelling against his age. When he was seventeen, being the baby had seemed like a kick in the teeth to all of his hard-work, his devotion to becoming the perfect idol and his determination to be attractive to every eligible girl and boy he met. Now, he just wants someone to recognise that he needs a damn hug once in a while and to remind him to eat breakfast. “But… That would be nice, thank you.”

Yixuan and Wenhan laugh, but not _at_ him. Just fondly—in a way that reminds him of what it was like to live with them, and Yibo’s headache starts to lift.

Yixuan and Wenhan hug him closely before they part ways and Yibo hugs them back. It would be nice to live together again, he thinks, but he knows they never will. Even if they promote together, they’re past that. They have their own dorms with their project groups to go back to now. 

Yibo hugs them both once more before he gets into his cab, plastic bag filled with headache remedies and mild sleeping tablets, and if they find it unusual that he's seeking out skinship neither of them say anything. 

He’s grateful for it.

  
  
  
  
  


Seungyoun calls him out of the blue to tell him that one of his new groupmates is in love with Lan Wangji, to which Yibo says, “It’s because he’s a cool character. And probably because he is played by me.”

Seungyoun scoffs at this, so as punishment Yibo talks about the issues he’s having with his bike—even though Seungyoun has no idea what a good bike feels like, so really it’s wasted on him—for the next fifteen minutes without stopping. Then he asks, “What’s it like being one of the oldest members?”

“What?”

“In your new group,” he explains. He puts his phone onto speaker while he roots in his refrigerator for something to drink. He pulls out a bottle of water and kicks the refrigerator door shut with his heel as he walks away. “You’re, what, third oldest?”

“Second oldest.” 

“I can’t imagine that,” Yibo tells him. “You’re in the _maknae-line_!” He says it in Korean, dragging out the word in a sing-song tone, sugary sweet.

Seungyoun clicks his tongue. “I’m twenty three.”

“And? You’ll be fifty one day, age isn’t the point.” Yibo almost trips over the laundry basket— the one he has never emptied since Yixuan came over—as he heads to his couch. 

“It’s nice. I like looking out for the kids in the group,” Seungyoun says, and there is a fondness to his tone. “Why are you asking, anyway?”

“Don’t you miss being, you know, fussed over by others?” He mumbles it as he finishes, feeling awkward. He doesn’t know why he thought Seungyoun would get it. They might be the youngest members of Uniq, but Seungyoun had lived alone for years before they settled in their dorm back when they were trainees. They're not the same.

“Do _you_ miss being fussed over?” Seungyoun asks. He laughs, but then he pauses. “Wait. Is this, like, a kinky thing?”

“ _No!_ ” He huffs out a breath. "It really, really isn’t."

He wouldn’t be bringing it up like this, on the phone to someone he used to share a bed with, if it was. It’s not that _at all_. Yibo hasn't quite pinpointed what it is, but he guesses maybe it’s just nostalgia for a time when the world was at his feet and he had people around him, leading the way for him every day. Maybe he just hates doing his own chores. “No, it’s a... It's a comfort thing.”

“If you ask Yixuan-hyung nicely, he will fuss over you,” Seungyoun tells him. “Being an older brother is, like, ingrained into him and he loves you to pieces. He’ll come over and baby you if you want him to. That man needs to have children soon.”

“He already does baby me,” Yibo admits, because it's true. “He came over and did my laundry last month. He was talking about when we first debuted, remember? He’d help us pick out our clothes and he’d iron our T-shirt’s for us every morning.”

“He’d remind us to brush our hair and pretend to be annoyed when we wouldn’t go to sleep because we were playing video games.” Seungyoun laughs at the memory, but it’s a soft sort of laughter, sad even. “Then we’d pretend to go to sleep, but we’d just be lying there with the light off trying not to laugh.”

Yibo remembers. “No wonder we were always so difficult to wake up in the morning,” he muses. He wishes he were difficult to wake up now, but he’s managed to develop a sixth sense set to thirty minutes before his alarm is set to go off. 

“Do you remember when you got sick when we were staying in Seoul and he and Sungjoo wouldn’t leave you alone?” Seungyoun asks him. The line behind him is noisy, and Yibo wonders if he’s in his dorm or out somewhere with friends. 

“You moved out of our room and slept with Wenhan.” Yibo is still a little bit bitter at the memory. They’d been best friends, closer than best friends, and he’d _left_ him alone!

“They _made_ me! They babied me too, remember. They didn’t want two sick kids on their hands. You know I wouldn’t have left your disgusting, sweaty, sick side otherwise. You know that...”

“I know. It was nice, wasn’t it?” Yibo murmurs. “Having that influence around all of the time. Having people just—just there to look out for us.” 

“Yeah, you’re right. It all seemed a lot easier back then, didn’t it?” Seungyoun’s voice softens and Yibo grins because he _isn’t_ alone in this after all. 

"In some ways, it was, I guess." Yibo remembers how funny the tiniest things could be when they were younger. He remembers experiencing things for the first time, surrounded by his new family. He remembers feeling like it might last forever. "Do you ever miss having me as your roommate?"

"Of course I do." Seungyoun pauses, and maybe Yibo's hit a nerve it isn't time to press at, because then he says, "I have to go. You're in the same city as Yixuan and Wenhan right now, call them if you need them, okay?"

"I have other friends," Yibo says.

"I know you do, but they're not your _friends_ , they're your brothers." He laughs. "They'll put up with more of your shit."

It makes Yibo laugh too, because he knows that Seungyoun is right. "Like hanging out with me while doing my laundry?" he suggests.

"Exactly."

  
  
  
  
  
It's a couple of weeks later that Sungjoo sends a photo of Yibo to the group-chat they’ve had for years, through various number changes. It’s a photo from just before debut, and Yibo’s hair is a helmet of yellow-blonde, framing his face as he smiles sweetly at the camera. Sungjoo captions it _cute baby yibo!_ and includes a baby emoji.

Yibo’s gut reaction is to send back a gif of someone giving the middle finger, which is what he would probably have done six months ago, but objectively it _is_ a cute photo, so instead he just finds a photo of them all from their debut on a google image search and sends that back instead. _I miss you guys,_ he types, but then he taps delete all the way back to the start of the message, and doesn’t send it, because it wouldn’t be fair. It’s not on any of them that they’re not in the same place anymore, and that’s okay. That's how life works - things are meant to change. 

Still, some things don’t _have_ to change, so when he gets sick again a few weeks after he wraps up shooting for his next show, Yibo lets Yixuan bring him soup, and Wenhan send him dumb videos to cheer him up, and he thanks them with genuine affection. 

The soup Yixuan brings over simmers on the stove-top while they add Sungjoo and Seungyoun into a video call, and together they make fun of his scratchy voice, and they fuss over his sleepy face, and he is glad that they’re all still around him, with him even when they’re far away. 

He must fall asleep on the sofa, because when he awakes, Yixuan has gone, and there is a load of laundry neatly folded at his feet. Yibo grins to himself as he stretches, and heads to bed.

He can deal with the laundry tomorrow.


End file.
